Leadership for HIA seminars - News
As a result of the needs identified in our recent online survey, the North West Health Impact Assessment Capacity Building Programme is hosting a series of fully funded half day seminars on leadership for HIA. The seminars, conducted by the International Health Impact Assessment Consortium (IMPACT), have been developed for board members, senior managers and officers in Primary Care Trusts and Local Authorities who have a responsibility for developing healthy public policy or commissioning health services.
Further information is available on the events page
The North West Health Impact Assessment Capacity Building Programme (NW HIA CBP) is a two-year programme of work (January 2009-December 2010) that aims to increase capacity for Health Impact Assessment (HIA) across the north west region, and help create a culture whereby the potential health effects of policies and activities are routinely and systematically considered by public sector organisations and their partners.
The purpose of this website is to
- raise the profile of the project and publicise the work programme
- disseminate the outputs and learning from the project
- advertise project events including training and development opportunities
- signpost visitors to existing resources for health impact assessment
Have Your Say
We value your comments about this site and the North West Health Impact Assessment Capacity Building Programme. If you have any comments or queries, please contact the project administrator at nwhia@ljmu.ac.uk.
Health impact assessment (HIA) is concerned with improving the health of populations and reducing health inequality. It has been defined as:
'A combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, programme or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population' (Lehto and Ritsatakis, 1999).
Why do you need to know about HIA?
The Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive (2001/41/EC) explicitly refers to the need to consider the effect of developments on human health. The White Paper, 'Our health our care our say' (DH, 2006) also advocates for HIA to be used as a tool in making commissioning decisions for health and social care as does 'Health inequalities – progress and next steps' (DH, 2008). HIA can also support Local Area Agreement developments and form part of the evidence presented for the Comprehensive Area Assessment. In addition HIA is now being used within all Government departments as part of the revised Impact Assessment process to build 'healthy public policy'.